Sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Month: March 2014

It has taken me some time to bounce back from my total downer, and with the suspicion of it being my hormones going amok a doctor’s appointment have been made to see if that is the case and something can be done. At the same time, I’m not the kind of person that lets a downer hold me down for long, for me it’s not acceptable to allow it to go on for too long and I learnt years ago that how simplified it may sound, snapping out of it is the only way to deal. The longer you sit at home, feeling sorry for yourself, letting the bad thoughts take over, the worse it get and you will in the end reach some point where you wont be able to manage to sort it out yourself.

So I set myself I a deadline, deciding that no matter what, Thursday morning I was going to be out and about. I went to work, focusing on something else make it easier to wake up the next morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that. The sadness wont go away completely straight away and you need to be patient.

However, making it home after work this friday past there was no way I was going to spend the evening home alone, I could feel the bad thoughts and sadness returning, and I didn’t want them to take over. Then with some luck, I got what I wanted, which was an evening at a Danish Bodega. There’s plenty to say about Danish Bodegas, the clients can be questionable, you are still allowed to smoke in them and the beer is cheap. What I like about them is that you can be yourself, the pretence of the beautiful world stays at the door. Anyhow, I digress, I texted Da Teacher checking her plans for the evening, and it turned out that she was in the Bodega mood as well. I then sent a message to my favourite latte mum, wondering if she was in need of her train pass, she wasn’t and no, she didn’t mind letting me borrow it. I love my favourite latte mum! With all this done, I was out the door, picked up the pass and headed to the train station where the train gods, for once, was with me, having the train waiting for me at the platform and then again when I had to change trains in Copenhagen. That doesn’t happen often so I saw it as a clear sign that I was doing the right thing.

Me and Da Teacher had a pretty awesome evening, having fun with random people, not overspending our own money and still hitting the sack in a decent time and when we woke up the next morning the sun was shining on us. Me with fingers crossed that latte mum wouldn’t need her monthly pass on that day either, headed out in town (together with DT of course) where a half marathon with 30000 runners took place. After a long walk we sat down in the sun with a nice cold beer watching the people run past. There was live music (quite annoying to be honest) and other friends coming and going, just a chill saturday in the sun, can you ask for more? Well apparently you can. As Miss T reached the goal she gave me a call and invited me to join for dinner that same night together with her and a bunch of my old colleagues, not in the budget at all but what the heck.

We ate so much food that I needed to go into a food coma afterwards and all I wanted was to head home to my bed, the gang wanted to go for one more drink so we did, one more cold beer for the road.

When I woke up Sunday morning, I woke up with a smile on my face and a boost of energy that I haven’t had for a long time. The effect of the weekend is still lasting with some extra help from today, as the sun was shining still and we had a big break between the morning and afternoon class. I had my first proper outdoor ice-cream of the year 🙂

Like this:

On Monday morning I woke up sad, seriously sad and all I wanted to do was to pull the cover over my head and pretend that the world didn’t exist, just stay in the dark. As the good girl I am, I pulled myself together, got over it and got up and made my way to school. Because that is what you are supposed to do, right, just get over it and go through the motions of your life, not let the sadness pull you down.

When I got home I spent the rest of the day on my couch crying. Why was I crying? Because the sadness inside just took over and left no energy or want for anything else. The bad part about spending a whole afternoon and evening crying is that everything that needs to be done doesn’t get done, the studying, the little things at home, and then that starts stressing you out, making you feel worse. You start thinking about all the things you should have done, feel bad because you haven’t done them and then you go to bed and find that sleep doesn’t want to hang out, because your mind is full of what a waste the afternoon has been.

Tuesday came and the sadness remained, I called in sick to work, I know that what I have doesn’t fall under the common definition of being sick. However with no ability to really stop crying, with no energy and with a temporary loss of the ability to sort out my thoughts, I wouldn’t have been able to do my work. After crying for a few hours, I called my sister, just to ask her for a couple of jokes in order to get a break from the crying, to smile a bit. She has the worst jokes, so you can’t help but smile at them, technically they aren’t funny haha jokes, they just make me smile. Of course she also asked why? Why am I sad? Making me have to think about what is making me feel this way. Of curse there is more than one thing in play here. It’s spring, spring is rebirth and new and the inner wanderer in me wants to wander, and I can’t really do it. I have signed up for a three-year degree, here, where I am right now. And I have made a commitment to actually complete this degree, to other people and to me, as it turns out that even with the working experience that I have no one wants to hire me to do the things I like doing and what I want to do in the future, if I don’t have a degree. So I have to accept that I will be staying here, in this apartment, in this area, in this country for the coming three years. It’s all about acceptance, and I have to find a way to accept that this is my life for now. So I suffer from growing pains, and growing pains hurt. Remember the pain from when you were kids? When your body hurt so bad from growing pains? That’s what I have,it’s just my mind not my body that hurts and it makes me cry, like a little child. That bring us to the next part of my sadness, I used to have a real good talking buddy about things like this. Someone that was a good listener, not sure he actually listened to all I said, I just know that he would listen and say the right things to make me feel better about the situation, helping me accept and see the big picture, remind me that it was a light at the end of the tunnel. This coming Sunday would have been his birthday if he still was around, the birthday together with me feeling unhappy just make me miss him even more, my dad. For so many years I just took for granted that he was just a phone call away not matter the subject, a failed relationship, arguments with friends, general unhappiness, a mean boss, he listened through it all. Of course I called him with good news as well, it wasn’t all the bad things. Like when I got my B on my exam a couple of weeks back, calling him would have been the first thing I did, because you could hear the pride in his voice, he was real good at that to. Of course we had our disagreements and arguments over the years as well, I was an annoying teenager once and after that he was my boss for a few years, so trust me it hasn’t always been pink clouds and unicorns. It’s just that I don’t miss that now for some reason.

Today it is Wednesday and I’m still crying, I still get nothing done and right now I’m working real hard telling me that it is ok, to not feel bad about being home yet another day, at the same time I have told myself that this have to be the last day. Tomorrow I will have to “get over it”, pull myself together and continue my life, I can’t accept that this goes on for another day. So today will be spent pulling myself together, baby steps, trying to do one small thing at a time, what do I need done? Read a couple of chapters in my textbook and do the exercises, I don’t want to fall behind in school. Now that I showed myself that I can be a B student (something pretty new for me, as I was never the one to get good grades in school) I want to have more of them, and for that I have to stay on track and keep studying. I need to sort out my home, do the dishes, make the bed, maybe a load of laundry. Small things that make me feel that I have accomplished something, that does do wonder for a person like me, in a mood like this. Maybe if the rain takes a break I can go for a short walk, get some fresh air and enjoy the nature, give my mind a chance to focus on something other than the things that are making me sad.

The sane part of my brain (there is a tiny chunk of that) is telling me that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, on Friday me and my favourite latte mum is hitting the cinema (fingers crossed that her children stay well and happy), spending time with her is always nice. And then my sister is coming down for a visit, bringing that husband of hers and her little girls (hopefully they will be in a hugging mood so I can squeeze some hugs out of them, nieces-hugs are the best). Tomorrow night I can hit my favourite pub quiz, that usually does wonders for my mood as well. And generally I’m not unhappy with studying, it is interesting and I even find it fun at times. I’m in the process of making a new friend there as well, lets name her the study buddy. I even have a part-time job that I thoroughly enjoy, I just have to make it there. Life is good, it really is, it’s just different, and maybe not ultimately what I want. All the pictures are from the #100happydays challenge that I’m currently participating in.

Like this:

This Sunday past me and my favourite latte mum had some nice plans, a trip to the craft fair that was on here in Malmö over the weekend. We agreed to meet at the central station in order to take the train out to the location of the fair, and as it happened me eating a Subway before getting started. I had spent the morning in the tub with my book and totally forgotten all about time and food. We ended up sitting at the Subway for a while, you know chatting away in the way only women do ;), and it was past one before we headed up to the Malmömässan to start our fun and hopefully loads of shopping. It’s just that we reached our goal the signs said something about condos in Spain, and other real estate related things. Ooops, as it turned out, we had made our way to the wrong location.

There was nothing else to do than head out in the rain and wind in order to find a bus to the correct location, and since I am such a good girl, I double checked that we were waiting at the right bus stop, we don’t want to go in the wrong direction now, do we? The bus shows up, we get on and the bus start moving – towards the country side. Latte mum says it have to be the wrong direction, and me, since I checked, very firmly says no of course not, it probably just go around. Latte mum doesn’t want to hear it and checks on her phone, we are going in the wrong direction so all we could do was to get of. In the country side, there were horses and stuff.

After another wait for the bus, we manage to get on one in the right direction, get of at the right stop and make our way to our beloved crafts fair. I will admit that my expectations was probably set a tad bit to high and I was hoping for more discounted stuff. Especially some big bins of cheap yarn, however it wasn’t to be. I got out of there with some darning needles, a couple of cable-stitch pins, fabric for a new scarf and cute little thingies.

And not to forget, my awesome granny bag in happy colours that just make me smile. It’s the inner bohemian hippie inside of me that is fighting to get out now that I’m not married to the corporate world anymore. And who am I to resist?

It only took us an hour to check out all the stalls, so we went for coffee before heading home, so we could max our together time 🙂It was a very good way to spend a Sunday peeps, I strongly recommend it. Seriously it’s so much better to hang with your friends IRL rather than over Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber or any other way of communicating!

Like this:

I can’t move, I can’t think, I can’t really do anything. I was sitting on the couch feeling sorry for myself, and felt hungry, so I ordered food. Really, it was afternoon and the sun was shining so I could have gone somewhere for food, I didn’t. I ordered food and then I ate almost all of it;

Now I only have myself to blame, maybe a little nap before I study. Can Sushi make your tummy explode?